November 5, 2023 - 3:00pm
Sixty-one years and four weeks since The Beatles released their first song, “Love Me Do”, they released their last. “Now and Then”, unveiled to the rapture of misty-eyed boomers at the end of last week, is a mournful, second-tier ballad originally sketched out by John Lennon on the piano in his Manhattan apartment, only a few years before he was shot dead outside the same building in 1980.
An AI-powered audio tool, developed by the director Peter Jackson while working on the 2021 Beatles documentary Get Back, has now exhumed Lennon’s quavering vocal from the distorted tape to which it was committed. It’s combined with modern contributions from Paul and Ringo; 1995 guitar work from George Harrison, who died of cancer in 2001; and harmonies from 1960s Beatles tunes like “Because” and “Eleanor Rigby”. This is less a song than a séance, calling forth the warbling and jangling of the dead.
The video, directed by Jackson, is worse. Footage ranging from the early days of the band until the present is spliced into an ahistorical patchwork. At one point, Lennon gazes pensively at a sunset, which is replaced by four young Beatles clutching straw hats, and then by a modern-day Paul swaying in the sky next to his microphone. Studio performance clips feature Beatles in Sergeant Pepper outfits, plucked out of clips from decades earlier, not quite playing in time. As today’s Paul sits at a mixing board, yesterday’s Paul dances at his shoulder. Today’s Ringo plays drums next to his historical self. The Fab Four have become the Four Phantoms.
The impulse behind this is understandable. According to Giles Martin, son of Beatles producer George Martin, “Paul just misses John and he wants to work on a song with him. It’s just as simple as that.” It’s a nice sentiment, albeit one that must be taken with the fact that “Now and Then” is being used as an excuse to reissue The Beatles’ greatest hits albums, 1962-1966 and 1967-1970. To paraphrase the late critic Mark Fisher, it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of Beatles re-releases.
Fisher, who wrote extensively and perceptively about cultural stagnation, would have seen “Now and Then” coming. Modern life is being haunted by more than a few rock-and-roll Scousers. Musicians old enough for free bus passes are still headlining festivals. Both in the UK and in America, the top-grossing films of recent years are almost entirely prequels, sequels, spinoffs, reboots, or additions to a “cinematic universe”. This is up from only a quarter in the years before 2000.
There is, fundamentally, no cultural break between 20-somethings like me and 50-somethings like my parents. We listen to much of the same music — New Order’s “Blue Monday” had my entire immediate family dancing raucously at my sister’s 21st — and watch the same films. There’s broad agreement on fundamental issues like climate change and minority rights. Generational conflicts, for instance over trans rights, are more about how liberal values are put into practice than about the values themselves.
It means that the economic gulf between us, regarding housing in particular, is harder to articulate. In the Fifties and Sixties, adults had to invent a new word, “teenager”, to describe their children, so alien did they find youth culture. Kids today raid their parents’ wardrobes and music collections. How can you understand how materially different your child’s life will be to your own if, on a cultural level, you’re so simpatico? We need new stories. We need new music that shocks and offends our elders. We don’t need a new Beatles song.
Josiah Gogarty is assistant editor at The Knowledge, an email news digest, and a freelance writer elsewhere.
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SubscribeWhat a horrible, poisonous piece of writing. I hope the author is just doing it tongue-in-cheek, like people of their generation seem to do on social media nowadays; I would hate to thing that it’s a genuinely-held opinion. It’s just so nasty.
What is it that you object to? The fact that the writer doesn’t like the ‘new’ Beatles’ song or the fact that he thinks young people should like different stuff to their parents? I must confess, I read the article and nothing in it struck me as ‘nasty’ or ‘poisonous’. Surely he’s making fun of his own generation for not being able to create anything of their own. That strikes me as being quite a reasonable position.
That’s my take too. The use of the word “nasty” by CP to describe the article displays precisely the lack of ability to understand the need to break cultural norms that the current generation lacks.
Why are you reacting so hysterically? I am quite young and I entirely agree with the author’s premise. Modern culture is nothing more than regurgitation.
Give me a break. Don’t blame the Beatles for todays cultural stagnation. The Beatles with dead people’s voices repackaged is still better than most music put out today. Why crap on a beautiful creation that celebrates the glorious art that was the Beatles? This article is just myopic and non-appreciate beyond belief.
What a trivial ending to an otherwise useful piece.
We need new stories. We need new music that shocks and offends our elders. We don’t need a new Beatles song.
Why can’t we have both? Having the one doesn’t exclude the other. Rather than acting as a “cultural doom loop”, the last Beatles song should be a challenge to the next generation to do better. It really shouldn’t be difficult, but it does require something very important… the ability and the right to offend.
New for the sake of new is fatiguing. I’m 54 and got obsessed with Beatles music when I was 13; and listened to little else for 3 years, and then matured. I still love them, but as I get older I think they did their best work up to and including Revolver- until then I always thought Sgt Pepper onwards was the apogee but it’s self-indulgent and patchy. When I was 17 I thought Lennon was the master: now I value McCartney, very obviously. No need for these footnotes from Paul and Giles Martin, although I think this is a better song than ‘Free as a Bird’ 28 years ago…
I’d agree with that, except that i’m not arguing “new for the sake of the new”. There’s enough going on in the world we find ourselves in from the Beatles heyday that’s a different paradigm to enable new music to be created that reflects this. Where is it?
The problem is there was nothing new about the song. An old Lennon demo tape, old Harrison guitar licks and harmonies from past hits with new contributions tacked on by Paul and Ringo does not constitute something new. It is a sad and disgusting gimmick to make a buck. A sign of something much more insidious than new for the sake of new.
A 12-inch vinyl of the single is going for $23.00 on Amazon and the reissued greatest hits on vinyl are going $63.00 dollars apiece.
And Mr. Martin wants me to believe that Paul just misses John, what a laugh.
“Sad” “Disgusting” “insidious”. I fear you may be overreacting. It’s an interesting bit of technology, a nice enough song, and a reason for a bit of nostalgia. There is also nothing wrong with making money from what you create.
If you don’t think AI assisted art is insidious than you will be in for a rude awakening. Wait until Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin release new material created by AI.
Everyone can now buy a phone they can use to create fake photos and it is being heavily advertised on TV. I wonder what that will lead to.
“We need new music that shocks and offends our elders. We don’t need a new Beatles song.”
I am offended by lots of rap music that refers to women as bitches and whores and they want to fxck this and fxck that…to shoot up this and shoot up that…
A new Beatles song is a welcomed salve.
Why are you listening to The Beatles? There’s lots of stuff your generation is listening to. Just an excuse to pretend you’re radical and out there by criticising something you have no idea about? Critics hey! all you can do is criticise because you can’t actually do anything. I don’t need a critic to tell me why I shouldn’t like stuff. Its a throwaway song by a master song writer, and its bloody good, better than most attempts at songwriting by anyone, dead or alive. Thats how good they still are.
The idea that Now and Then is just a cash grab seems silly. Paul McCartney is literally a billionaire. The idea that the song is illegitimate because it uses technology to enhance raw vocal and musical inputs is equally silly. This is how almost all Beatles songs came together and it’s how almost all pop music is produced today. Ditto for contemporary music videos; they are collages of fragmented and often non-synchronous images and ideas. The only serious question is whether Now and Then works as a song. Personally, I cannot get it out of my head. I think it is, like so much of the Beatles catalogue, brilliant.
I don’t really understand what the problem is.
Old musicians release music =/= young musicians can’t release music.
Kinda hard to shock and offend us when your age group is the most conformist in my 65 years on this planet. Everything offends you.
“People like to put us down,
Talking about my generation,
Just because we’re still around
Talking about my generation”
Nice twist on classic lyrics.
Soon they’ll be having us put down.
I don’t understand, you can listen to the new Beatles song and enjoy the video if you so please, or you can enjoy something else. There are endless streaming services and video sites to enjoy music on, we are no longer limited to a handful of TV and Radio Stations that dictate what we hear. Try and enjoy thay freedom.
The idea that The Beatles are somehow no longer relevant is beyond daft. They remain as one of the most influential groups in popular music. If you listen to interviews with musicians today many of them will still mention The Beatles. This isn’t some archival recording from Gerry and the Pacemakers. It is a new recording with creative input from all four – somewhat different from how they worked before but not entirely so. Many songs did not involve all four and many were Lennon or McCartney. It’s entirely newsworthy.
Why does music have to shock and offend your elders?
Since time immemorial, many dynamic young ‘uns have wanted to separate from the parents/family, and make their mark. Shocking & offending is the easy way to do it (as the Punks found out, you don’t even have to know how to play a guitar or carry a song – the great Rock and Roll swindle) – making an impression, less so. There is a new wrinkle now though – young ones making their mark by affecting shock and offence – towards the older generations. Little passive-agressive, ego-surfing, denouncements of the elders
New music and stories are being produced. They’re just not being produced by Hipsters and Yuppies that apparently feel themselves perpetually entitled to be representatives of the “Counterculture.”
Newsflash, the Counterculture became the Dominant Culture. It turns out that Culture doesn’t work well when those with “Cultural Capital” that are actually running the culture spend all their time complaining about how bad it is.
Well said. There’s lots of great music out there. It’s harder to find because we’re not getting the same six bands rammed down our throat by two or three record labels, but it’s out there.
I love the old music too, but I would rather watch a cover band perform, than the corpse of Elton John, an excruciating experience I had to endure last year for the sake of marital bliss.
Yes, I thought it extraordinary that Elton finishes the highest grossing tour in history (?) only to ‘have a fall ‘ at home and be rushed off to have his hip checked. Mind you, unlike Billy Joel, they are the originals.
The 21st century has produced very little in the way of art. Cancel culture has stopped artists from being able to freely create without constant self censorship as one slip can destroy careers. Not the way to produce anything worthwhile.
Cancel culture’s impact on rap and rock has been zero – listen to da lyrics….
“We need new music that shocks and offends our elders. We don’t need a new Beatles song“. I disagree. The music of the Beatles will offend just about anybody supporting Hamas, young and old. There was a reason Hamas attacked and humiliated young people enjoying a music festival in Israel, and captured them as hostages held in their tunnels. They are more than ‘offended’ by Western culture and music, it deserves death. I suggest blasting out the Beatles ‘Revolution’ down the tunnels, or anything that the hostages would appreciate from the music festival … giving them hope perhaps that a different reality exists beyond the one they’re imprisoned in. If it was me, that’s what I’d want to hear, ‘Don’t you know it’s gonna be, all right’ whilst at the same time knowing the existential pain it was giving my Hamas masters. Come on John, Paul, George, and Ringo, one two three four … ! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGLGzRXY5Bw
Has this ailment called cultural stagnation been misdiagnosed? The rather self-serving assumption made by learned cultural commentators is always the same: a fatal depletion of the spirit of youthful rebellion from which all true creativity is supposed to spring. But is that really the case?
I suspect that the possibilities of the post Rock ‘n’ Roll musical form (itself growing out of blues and jump-jazz) have been thoroughly exhausted. As punk rock so pathetically demonstrated it does not follow that shock and offence will create new music. Rather they will simply fulfil the hopes of journalists and other cultural pundits yearning for the next big thing.
This boomer thought the reunited Beatles, alive and dead, was creepy and ghoulish, another example of corporate capitalism’s willingness to do anything for a buck. The cultural stagnation we are experiencing is because of neo-liberal capitalism’s aversion to risk which has deluged us with the tried and true and the bland.
Hollywood will be next. When people stop buying things like “Shrek 9 – the homecoming” the film industry will start pushing AI “reimagined” films using”dead actors ….
A lot of people are reading too much into this. It’s just John Lennon saying he misses The Beatles every now and then. It’s both sad and catchy, like a lot of their songs. After they got past the animosity, they could finally look back in wonder at what they’d been part of. It isn’t straining for any kind of contemporary relevance!
Did Bach, Mozart and Vivaldi offend their elders? I don’t know.
The Fiat 500, the last VW Beetle, the Dodge Challenger, the Chevrolet Camaro, endless iterations of the Mini. The same dance songs playing on the radio that I listened 20+ years ago, or remixes of them. It’s like we haven’t moved forward for decades. The West lacks confidence and keeps looking to the past.
I loved growing up in the sixties and all the music then. I’m not a fan of nostalgia and was quite happy to let it go when it was over, and move on.
It’s my kids’ generation, raised in the “Britpop” era, who resurrected all this stuff and got me listening to it again with fresh ears.
“We need new stories. We need new music that shocks and offends our elders.”
The ‘youth’ wanting new stories and new music is as hackneyed as the new Beatles song this article uses as a hook.
New rap/grime/drill/whatever music does shock and offend a lot of us in its vileness and lack of soul and personality. Problem is, it’s just garbage.
The old joke about art was that you had to understand the rules and know their limitations in order to break them.
With modern push button technology all the effort and jeopardy is removed both in creating art and its dissemination. Less need to take “risks”.
In the 1970s bands had to do long overseas tours to promote their records and get noticed. Tours lost money, today it’s the reverse. Money is made on tours and “merch”, not on units of singles/albums downloaded or streamed.
Audiences of so called heritage bands generally don’t want to hear new music, just the hits. Like others have said there is good music out there, you have to go and find it.
You could vape
Our cultural doom loop ? Give it a rest ! The doom loop that we are in is totally because of the leaders we have here in Canada and the States . Justin Trudeau has no vision for our beautiful country and Joe Biden is just too old !
Then f**k risk-aversion off
The world belongs to the generation who grew up with the Fabs. and control the world’s tangible assets now. Let them enjoy their nostalgia leisure economy as it pays all our ways.
While the media feeds them woke, the real cultural power lies with the likes of E Musk nonetheless. He who controls the Net controls the future of work and cultural reproduction.
The bottom line is: the song is terrible. It just doesn’t hold a candle to anything that wound up on their (original) albums. Even the most talented artists produce rubbish that should never see the light of day.
Luckily, anyone who disagrees is welcome to listen to it on a loop until the end of the world. I listened once. That’s more than enough for me.
My opinion as well. I listened and thought “who are these guys?” Mediocre music.
Dead right – it’s embarrassing.
Over-rated now and over-rated then.